56 members (50%) of WVU’s School of Medicine Class of 2027 M.D. Candidates are female.[1] These 56 women, as well as every other woman who has earned an M.D. in America, are all following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Blackwell, who shattered the glass ceiling in American medical academies.
Portrait of Elizabeth Blackwell, ca. 1850–1860.
Born in England in 1821, Blackwell was the third of nine children. Growing up in a liberal Quaker family, Blackwell moved to Cincinnati in 1832, at age eleven. When she was seventeen, her father died, leaving the family impoverished at the height of a national economic crisis. To support themselves, Elizabeth, her mother, and two older sisters entered the largely female field of teaching.[2] This profession, at the time, was one of the few careers available to white middle-class women.
While she wrote in her 1895 memoirs that she had “hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust,” Blackwell eventually decided to leave teaching and enter the field of medicine.[3] Inspired by a close friend who, on her deathbed, told Elizabeth that she would have suffered less if a “lady doctor” had cared for her, she began consulting with several family friends that were practicing doctors. All of them told her that it was impossible for her, as a woman, to enter the field. A few even told her that she needed to disguise herself as a man to graduate medical school and practice.[4]
Blackwell was not discouraged by this advice. Rather, she wrote, “The idea of winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.”[5] With money saved from teaching to afford a medical education, she applied to every medical school in New York and Philadelphia and over a dozen other schools in New England. After receiving rejections from 29 institutions, in October 1847, she was finally accepted into Geneva Medical College in upstate New York (predecessor to SUNY Upstate Medical University).[6]
Geneva Medical College, where Blackwell studied medicine, c. 1846-1877 (courtesy of Hobart and William Smith Archives and Special Collections, https://hwslibrary.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16757coll1/id/1044/rec/117)
While her admission might seem to be a sign of progress and gender equality, it was the opposite. Geneva’s faculty assumed that their all-male student body would never agree to allow a woman to join their cohort and thus allowed them to vote on her acceptance. As a joke, the men voted to admit her.[7]
Regardless of the circumstances of her admission, Blackwell attended Geneva, facing discrimination at every turn. Initially, she was excluded from observing medical demonstrations and forced to sit separately from the men during lectures. In addition, the women in the town considered her a “bad woman” or “insane.” Despite these difficulties, she petitioned the professors into allowing her to participate in dissections and surgical observations, won the respect of many of the men in her classes, and graduated first in her class in 1849.[8] With her diploma, Blackwell successfully became the first woman to earn an M.D. in the United States.
Despite her success in medical school, Blackwell faced even more obstacles after her graduation. She left for Europe, hoping to supplement her American medical education with experience in London and Paris. There, like she had in her early days at Geneva, she was met with opposition by the men in medicine and restricted to working only in nursing and midwifery.[9] Sadly, while working in Paris, she contracted an eye infection that caused her to lose sight in her left eye, permanently ending her dream to practice surgery.[10]
Returning to New York City, Blackwell decided to open a private practice. However, she was met with “a blank wall of social and professional antagonism” -- in other words, she had difficulty receiving patients. Due to the trouble of practicing medicine, Elizabeth shifted to advocacy for hygiene and public health, and, more significantly, the promotion of medical education for women.[11] Joining with her sister, Emily, who had graduated with honors from the Medical College of Cleveland, and Marie Zakrzewska, who graduated from Western Reserve College (now Case Western), Elizabeth opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. The NY Infirmary was a full-scale hospital that treated poor patients and trained and hired women doctors.[12] It still exists as the NYU Downtown Hospital.[13]
“My whole life is devoted unreservedly to the service of my sex. The study and practice of medicine is in my thought but one means to a great end…the true ennoblement of woman.”Elizabeth Blackwell
Blackwell’s career training women in medicine continued through the 1860s. During the Civil War, she and Emily trained nurses that treated Union soldiers and gathered medical supplies to supplement the under-equipped Army Medical Department. Blackwell’s wartime advocacy efforts ultimately resulted in the formation of the US Sanitary Commission (USSC), an important civilian organization that was vital to the medical treatment of federal troops throughout the conflict. In 1868, the Blackwell sisters founded Women’s Medical College in New York, where Elizabeth served as its first chair of hygiene. This institution, unlike other medical schools at the time, allowed women to get a comprehensive education that was free of the discrimination that she and others faced.[14]
“The Anatomy Lecture Room at the Woman’s Medical College of New York Infirmary,”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 16, 1870
Elizabeth’s tenure at the Woman’s Medical College was short. Less than a year after the college opened she returned to England and spent the rest of her life in Great Britain.15 Her career in England remained eventful. In 1871, she helped found the National Health Society. In 1875, she accepted a chair in gynecology at the New Hospital and London School of Medicine for Women. Less than a year after, however, she resigned from academia and devoted the rest of her life to lecturing, writing, and advocating for causes such as public health, moral reform, and suffrage.[16] Elizabeth Blackwell passed away at the age of 89 on May 31, 1910. She was buried in Kilmun in the Scottish Highlands, leaving behind a significant legacy of accomplishments in medicine, public health, and reforms.[17]
Elizabeth Blackwell c. 1877 (courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The first women were allowed to enroll in WVU in 1889, although it was not until the early 1900s that they began to follow Blackwell’s path and study medicine. The “Elizabeth Blackwell” of WVU was Phoebia Moore, from Mannington in Marion County. Like every student of the period, Moore spent two years studying at the WVU College of Medicine and finished her medical degree at another institution-- in this case, Bennett Medical College, where she earned her M.D. in 1903. From 1901 to the first four-year M.D. class’s graduation in 1962, about 70 women were among the about 1,600 students who graduated WVU’s two-year medical program. This is, of course, an incredibly small amount compared to the significant female demographic in the WVU M.D. Class of 2027, 56 women (50% of the class)![18]
Statue of Elizabeth Blackwell at Hobart and William Smith Colleges
(courtesy of Hobart and Willim Smith Archives and Special Collections,
https://hwslibrary.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16757coll1/id/2828/rec/2)
For more images of Elizabeth Blackwell’s medical education experience and legacy in Geneva, NY, please visit https://www.hws.edu/about/history/elizabeth-blackwell/photos.aspx